Preface to the theme issue which tackles the biological, psychological, neural, and cultural underpinnings of laughter in humans and other animals from a naturalistic and evolutionary perspective

Elisabetta Palagi

Fausto Caruana

Frans B. M. de Waal

English

PubMed

Archivio della Ricerca - Università di Pisa

 Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/ on 13 September 2023 royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rstbPrefaceCite this article: Caruana F, Palagi E, de WaalFBM. 2022 Cracking the laugh code: laughterthrough the lens of biology, psychology andneuroscience. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 377:20220159.https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0159Received: 20 June 2022Accepted: 20 June 2022One contribution of 17 to a theme issue‘Cracking the laugh code: laughter through thelens of biology, psychology and neuroscience’.Subject Areas:behaviour, cognition, evolution, neuroscienceAuthor for correspondence:Fausto Caruanae-mail: fausto.caruana@in.cnr.it© 2022 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionLicense http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the originalauthor and source are credited.Cracking the laugh code: laughterthrough the lens of biology, psychologyand neuroscienceFausto Caruana1, Elisabetta Palagi2 and Frans B. M. de Waal31Institute of Neuroscience, National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Via Volturno 39/E, 43125 Parma, Italy2Unit of Ethology, Department of Biology, University of Pisa, via A. Volta 6, 56126, Pisa, Italy3Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USAFC, 0000-0002-4631-7543; EP, 0000-0002-2038-4596; FBMdW, 0000-0003-2021-66531. IntroductionLaughter affects conversational schemes, supports speech production, estab-lishes social bonds and is connected to playfulness. Despite the pervasivenessof this behaviour, research on laughter has long been underdeveloped, prob-ably because it does not sound like a serious topic. Also, its social andexpressive nature represents a major technical difficulty for both laboratoryand naturalistic studies. The quest to uncover the processes underlying the pro-duction and perception of laughter is still in its early days, but a renewedinterest in this behaviour has boosted the emergence of new ecological studiesin a set of fields encompassing a broad spectrum of disciplines.This Theme Issue aims to tackle the biological, psychological, neural and cul-tural underpinnings of laughter in humans and other animals from a naturalisticand evolutionary perspective. A new naturalistic account of laughter has beenboosted by thework of the psychologist Robert Provine (1943–2019) and the neu-roscientist Jaak Panksepp (1943–2017), towhom this issue is dedicated. Accordingto this view, laughter must be studied considering the behavioural intentions itconveys and the response it elicits in the recipient. Notably, such an approachshifts the focus of attention from the cognitive underpinnings of humour proces-sing to the adaptive socio-emotional nature of laughter, which signals not onlyreward and amusement but also affiliation and benign intentions.The naturalistic study of human laughter is also supported by the wideacceptance that other species show a homologue of laughter. Playful laughexpressions of the great apes and other primates not only morphologicallyresemble human laughter but they share important social functions andneural substrates. However, similar play vocalizations have probably evolvedmultiple times in evolution, as in the case of play vocalizations in rats.This Theme Issue synthesizes existing knowledge on laughter in humansand other animals through the lens of an evolutionary approach. The great var-iety of contributions proposed in this issue includes new insights from ethology,anthropology, social psychology and cognitive and affective neuroscience, thusproviding an overarching perspective of the laughter phenomenon.The issue consists of two main sections:(i) A first section is theoretical in nature. An opinion piece provides a unify-ing framework across the different disciplines also suggesting furtherideas to expand the knowledge through a comparative approach(Palagi et al. [1]). Then four reviews frame laughter studies in the fieldsof anthropology (Dunbar [2]), ethology (Davila-Ross & Palagi [3]), psy-chology (Scott et al. [4]) and cross-cultural studies (Bryant &Bainbridge [5]).(ii) A second section is entirely dedicated to new empirical data, with studiestackling the issue of laughter in the fields of behavioural studies (Burkeroyalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rstb2 Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/ on 13 September 2023 et al. [6], Proelss et al. [7]), social psychology (Hess [8],Wood [9]), consciousness studies (Prochazkova et al.[10]), neuroimaging (Wattendorff et al. [11], Belyk et al.[12]), and computational (Celeghin et al. [13]), clinical(Sessa et al. [14]) and system neuroscience (Zauli [15],Sun [16]).Our hope is that the present Theme Issue will contributenot only to conciliate the different visions of laughter emergingby the different disciplinary origins of thinkers, but also to pro-vide new data supporting this new unifying naturalistic vision.Data accessibility. This article has no additional data.Authors’ contributions. F.C.: writing—original draft, writing—review andediting; E.P.: writing—original draft, writing—review and editing;F.B.M.d.W.: writing—original draft, writing—review and editing.All authors gave final approval for publication and agreed to beheld accountable for the work performed therein.Conflict of interest declaration. This theme issue was put together by theGuest Editor team under supervision from the journal’s Editorialstaff, following the Royal Society’s ethical codes and best-practiceguidelines. The Guest Editor team invited contributions and handledthe review process. Individual Guest Editors were not involved inassessing papers where they had a personal, professional or financialconflict of interest with the authors or the research described. Inde-pendent reviewers assessed all papers. Invitation to contribute didnot guarantee inclusion.Funding. We received no funding for this study.Phil.Trans.R.SoEditors’ biographiesc.B377:20220159Fausto Caruana is a neuroscientist at the Institute of Neuroscience of the National Research Council ofItaly (CNR) in Parma, specializing in social, cognitive and affective neuroscience. He has authoredmore than 60 papers on the neural and psychological mechanisms underlying emotions, empathy,mirror neurons and motor cognition. His research is conducted using a multidisciplinary approach,mainly centred on intracranial recordings and electrical stimulations.Elisabetta Palagi is Associate Prof. at the University of Pisa (Italy). She holds a PhD in EvolutionaryBiology. Her studies focus on comparative ethology of social carnivores (meerkats, lions, spottedhyenas), horses, sea lions and several primate taxa, including strepsirrhines, monkeys, great apesand humans since 1992. In 2020 she was awarded with the Animal Behaviour Society prize forher activity in the field for 10+ years and distinguished contributions.Frans B. M. de Waal is a Dutch/American biologist, ethologist and primatologist known for his workon the behaviour and social intelligence of primates, especially chimpanzees and bonobos. De Waal isC. H. Candler Prof. Emeritus at Emory University and Distinguished Prof. Emeritus at UtrechtUniversity. He is a member of the (US) National Academy of Sciences .3 Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/ on 13 September 2023 Referencesroyalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rstbPhil.Trans.R.Soc.B377:202201591. Palagi E, Caruana F, de Waal FBM. 2022 Thenaturalistic approach to laughter in humans andother animals: towards a unified theory. Phil. Trans.R. Soc. B 377, 20210175. (doi:10.1098/rstb.2021.0175)2. Dunbar RIM. 2022 Laughter and its role in theevolution of human social bonding. Phil. Trans. R.Soc. B 377, 20210176. (doi:10.1098/rstb.2021.0176)3. Davila-Ross M, Palagi E. 2022 Laughter, play facesand mimicry in animals: evolution and socialfunctions. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 377, 20210177.(doi:10.1098/rstb.2021.0177)4. Scott SK, Cai CQ, Billing A. 2022 Robert Provine: thecritical human importance of laughter, connectionsand contagion. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 377, 20210178.(doi:10.1098/rstb.2021.0178)5. Bryant GA, Bainbridge CM. 2022 Laughter andculture. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 377, 20210179.(doi:10.1098/rstb.2021.0179)6. Burke CJ, Pellis SM, Achterberg EJM. 2022 Who’slaughing? Play, tickling and ultrasonic vocalizationsin rats. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 377, 20210184.(doi:10.1098/rstb.2021.0184)7. Proelss S, Ishiyama S, Maier E, Schultze-Kraft M,Brecht M. 2022 The human tickle response andmechanisms of self-tickle suppression. Phil.Trans. R. Soc. B 377, 20210185. (doi:10.1098/rstb.2021.0185)8. Mauersberger H, Kastendieck T, Hetmann A, SchöllA, Hess U. 2022 The different shades of laughter:when do we laugh and when do we mimic other’slaughter? Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 377, 20210188.(doi:10.1098/rstb.2021.0188)9. Wood A, Templeton E, Morrel J, Schubert F,Wheatley T. 2022 Tendency to laugh is a stabletrait: findings from a round-robin conversationstudy. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 377, 20210187. (doi:10.1098/rstb.2021.0187)10. Prochazkova E, Venneker D, de Zwart R, Tamietto M,Kret ME. 2022 Conscious awareness is necessary toassess trust and mimic facial expressions, whilepupils impact trust unconsciously. Phil. Trans.R. Soc. B 377, 20210183. (doi:10.1098/rstb.2021.0183)11. Westermann B et al. 2022 When laughter arrestsspeech: fMRI-based evidence. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B377, 20210182. (doi:10.1098/rstb.2021.0182)12. Belyk M, McGettigan C. 2022 Real-time magneticresonance imaging reveals distinct vocal tractconfigurations during spontaneous and volitionallaughter. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 377, 20210511.(doi:10.1098/rstb.2021.0511)13. Méndez CA, Celeghin A, Diano M,Orsenigo D, Ocak B, Tamietto M. 2022 A deepneural network model of the primate superiorcolliculus for emotion recognition. Phil. Trans.R. Soc. B 377, 20210512. (doi:10.1098/rstb.2021.0512)14. Sessa P, Schiano Lomoriello A, Duma GM, Mento G,De Stefani E, Ferrari PF. 2022 Degenerate pathwayfor processing smile and other emotionalexpressions in congenital facial palsy: an hdEEGinvestigation. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 377, 20210190.(doi:10.1098/rstb.2021.0190)15. Zauli FM, Del Vecchio M, Russo S, Mariani V,Pelliccia V, d’Orio P, Sartori I, Avanzini P, Caruana F.2022 The web of laughter: frontal and limbicprojections of the anterior cingulate cortex revealedby cortico-cortical evoked potential from siteseliciting laughter. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 377,20210180. (doi:10.1098/rstb.2021.0180)16. Sun L, Lukkarinen L, Putkinen V, Karlsson HK,Hirvonen J, Tiihonen J, Lauerma H, Scott S,Nummenmaa L. 2022 Mu-opioid receptorsystem modulates responses to vocal bondingand distress signals in humans. Phil. Trans. R.Soc. B 377, 20210181. (doi:10.1098/rstb.2021.0181)

Cracking the laugh code: laughter through the lens of biology, psychology and neuroscience

Caruana, Fausto

Palagi, Elisabetta

de Waal, Frans B. M.

PubMed Central

https://arpi.unipi.it/bitstream/11568/1155218/2/rstb.2022.0159.pdf

Cracking the laugh code: laughter through the lens of biology, psychology and neuroscience

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